Test Kitchen Confidential: Lightened Baked Chocolate Mousse

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1. Bargaining with Chocolate

We had to decrease the amount of chocolate in our baked mousse, as it contributes a significant amount of saturated fat. But we didn’t want to risk losing that deep, intense chocolate flavor.

Tweak: Using our nutrition analysis software, we simply reformulated the recipe by cutting the chocolate back a smidge and increasing the number of servings—not a cheat because dessert portions are often too big anyway.

Result: Fine flavor, but portion size was just too small to fit our nutrition rules. Another problem: 70% of the calories still came from fat, and most of it saturated. This was not a balanced, healthy dessert.

2nd Tweak: Deb tinkered with adding good unsweetened cocoa to replace the additional chocolate we were cutting. The cocoa laid a deep, dark chocolate foundation with very little fat, and we were still able to use 5 ounces of chocolate.